I remember stumbling across http://www.plantwithbloom.com/ in the past and thinking it was amazing. Consider this at least a small thank-you for your efforts!
Thanks! Bloom is my latest endeavor, and one that I don't think belongs on the scrap heap yet.
I'm just not sure how to market it. I was going down a path of appealing to data-nerds with yards, focusing on the data techniques used to make decisions.
(pretty fun if you want to see some plants get wrecked)
The value seems too low as it to get people purchase it. I'm considering partnering with nurseries, but the build out to use their inventories would be ambitious.
I just checked out that link you posted. The idea seems like it could introduce a certain "naturalness" to the gardens by resisting the temptation to exactly plant in rows. "Organic" planting plans! https://ibb.co/nfnQh5 (screenshot of one that I found particularly interesting).
Yeah, gravity seemed like a good way to do circle packing with different sizes. Also would be a way to place neatly in irregularly shaped (non-rectangular) beds.
I was just thinking about something like this over the weekend when I was working on my garden. Something I was not sure if you did consider was the blooming times. When I first moved into my house I did not have much of a garden. The previous owner did not really keep the garden up. The first year I had a mish mash of different plants. By year 3 I have everything almost figured out where I have different stuff starting to bloom as other plants are finishing.
I was talking to a professional landscaper about this (a relative of my significant other) during a family event earlier this summer. The casual spouting of information about keeping the garden in color all summer was intriguing. It of course helped that he had done the entire backyard at her mother's house.
When every side project is wildly different and requires learning considerable new skills, there's clearly something else going on besides unenjoyable work just to bootstrap a business.
What're your goals? Thinking about what you really want out of side projects may help. It gets the blood pumping to think about building a project that is finally the one that makes you millions, but creating a highly profitable business is a very different set of skills to building the technical side of a side project.
I'm in a similar boat, you are doing FAR better than I ever have (many "plans that come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines" over here), but lately I've not been too disappointed.
I stopped caring if I failed to complete a project once my initial burst of interest disappeared - usually as I'd learned what I wanted to learn and my curiosity was best directed elsewhere rather than slogging on with a project I'd lost interest in (plenty of those you can get paid for, this is supposed to be hobby time!)
The new skills I learn for fun have led onto new jobs, better ability to function at my day job, friendships, collaborations, a fun summer at ITP Camp in New York, etc.
I agree. If your goals are to make money on your side project, you'll have to invest time into sales, bd, or the marketing aspects of these projects rather than purely the technical aspects.
I don't think they are worthless, you learned a lot, but it sounds like you also wish to have monetary benefits from them, so I would suggest rounding out your skill set.
> The exact opposite of the above. Spend my free time exploring things that really interest me without worrying about selling it or career application.
If you equate side project with hobby, yes. If you equate side project with entrepreneurship, then no. For a lot of people, I think it's somewhere in the middle.
You should try to publish some code for a change, as open source.
You can keep improving your skills but without having to worry about making money (thats what your job is for) and getting help/input from the community
Let me offer a possible coping mechanism: realize that you are an artist. You are a true hacker.
For people like us, having ideas and making them real is the purpose of life. Since the 90s, there has been an immense pressure on our community put everything we do in get-rich-quick terms, which as been super destructive the psyches of many hackers. Be mindful of this, then cast it aside.
No matter what, keep having ideas and making them real.
None of the apps or services are even close to art. (Including state of the art.)
This is the main problem of small projects that aren't cutting edge. To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.
(Even many startups fail this litmus test.)
Hacking is fun, but life as a starving programmer is not.
There is a vast difference between getting reasonable money and negative money.
Bigger than between making reasonable living wage and being filthy rich in fact.
>To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.
Building Uber and creating Uber are two entirely different things.
It is easy to build something if you have the blueprint, it is much harder to imagine something new and build it without knowing the exact next step.
Oh but Uber itself is a pretty big and ambitious idea past the single sentence description.
It also touches a basic need of transportation and is very ambitious.(trying to displace taxis everywhere)
Due to the scale of the idea, both creating and building Uber is a hard task. (Mostly because at small scale you have stiff competition - so it does not make sense asy small scale.)
For comparison, you could back of envelope analyse the market impact of, say, automated 2D floor and garden planning with AI. It is possible to undercut in a week in implementation and in seconds by a single guy with marketing and connections.
On the upside, it could be pivoted.
The main drawback is that it also does not make sense at a local level. (Unlike the 3D printer repair which might.)
They're all art, more or less. Most art isn't 'state of the art' and it's not obvious why that matters, unless you personally care about that. This person didn't seem to.
The existence of (lots of) 'starving artists' is pretty strong evidence that at least some people may ultimately benefit from art that doesn't turn a profit.
Some people definitely need to make art, whatever the cost to them personally. I'm one of them. (And I'm lucky that my art is really cheap to make.)
The author mentions being a full time software engineer and working on these projects after work. I think he isn't a starving programmer; and I'm going to guess he's probably even getting more than "reasonable money" (but not filthy rich).
It's really more of a question of finding meanings; I see where he's coming from. There is a certain kind of despair when you look back at 10 years worth of side projects and none have "taken off". I've only seriously worked on side projects in the past 3~4 years (full time engineer for 10 years), and even with less than half the time spent, and less than half projects completed compared to OP, I still feel a bit of this.
How do you define art? I've always liked Scott McCloud's definition from Understanding Comics: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction."
In my view, anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist.
I am not super familiar with Scott McCloud so sorry for that, but I'm very admirable of comics from a distance.
I think it's worth mentioning I think this might be a little outdated of a definition because philosophy and art is agreeing more every day that everything in art grows out of the survival and reproduction instincts.
They also appear to agree more every day that your last point, that "anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist" holds true.
Consider the question of why humans evolved to make art in the first place, and you'll probably conclude that it was sexual selection. In other words, artists get laid. Though it may be that artists get respect in general, which improves chances of survival in a social species like ours. So I respectfully disagree with Mr. McCloud's definition.
What then about anonymous artists such as Banksy? Many of the artists we today view as great, such as Van Gogh, were in their time neither respected nor enjoyed financial or, as you offer, sexual benefits from their art. They still pursued it, often into abject poverty and early deaths.
Why reduce all activity to such simplistic motivations? Maybe art is a spandrel. Maybe artists don't get laid any more often than non-artists. Maybe human beings do lots of things that have little to do with passing their genetic material on, because we've acquired motivations that aren't simply reducible to survival or sex. Maybe some of us realized that making art was enjoyable, regardless of whatever reason it arose in the species a couple million years ago.
> To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.
Just as an aside, serious free software maintenance work is not cutting edge and also fulfills your challenge of not being "outsource-able" to a small team of low-wage devs.
Or at least I've always assumed it is. Where can I pay some small amount of money to test and see whether a small team can "fix X without breaking the users' existing programs" for a poorly documented FLOSS interface that depends on undefined behavior in C?
Scratch that-- I just realized that most of the problems I encounter in FLOSS maintenance consist of explaining/documenting the problem. Once I can refine the question of, "Why is the loader being a butt," to, "Why is the loader recursing 1000 levels deep before bailing?" I'm already 90% of the way to solving the problem.
If it takes a single person about a week to do it and mostly by solving a puzzle, then it is not art again, but craft.
Even writing an OSS project from scratch. It only becomes art if it really is done either clearly superior or is something entirely new. Plus it must be executed really well.
A cutting edge product does not mean a successful product. There's plenty of tech already. All I need is for someone to help me make my life better with a killer product or service that uses it or at least show me how to use tech better towards my advantage. Perfect example, binder clips, low tech but I'm always finding new uses for it and people show me new uses. Another example the tech for cell phones was around for years before the cell phone. It took someone to put it together to create something useful.
They very much are art. Even if you're writing the nth incarnation of some tired JS pattern framework, you're coding it the way you want. Your making an API that makes sense to you. In short, the way you chose to implement the tired Ideas is unique to you. It's self expression that others can see. How is that different than a painter reinterpreting some famous piece of work?
So I guess Warhol isn't art? You are making some very opinionated claims that don't have any basis in, well anything. Take a read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art
Products for the sake of art will not make you a business success. You have to ship and you have to sell. Tinkering and producing products for yourself is very satisfying but don't expect to have a killer business out of it. If that's what you want to do then get a job in a research lab or a product development company. It will be a dream come true. A perfect example of someone that loved to tinker and research but could not produces a successful product was Tesla. He invented mind blowing technology but was never able to create a successful company out of it. As a matter of fact the Google funders learnt from him and decided to put business and profit above technology so they could have the money to produce and finance the tech they love.
Even if none of these were a commercial success, it's quite a resume and shows an ability to bring an idea to life. I think what the author needs to do is look for a business savvy partner that can focus on making a viable product. They're different skill sets. The Jobs/Wozniak kind of synergy.
I build a lot of things in my own time as well and I learn a lot from them. But for me they're not "worthless". They are just my way of mental relaxation and being my true self, which I cannot do in the commercial world.
I love building stuff that has no purpose whatsoever but is just cool. I love building stuff that only I have a use for. I love doing tech for artistic value because I believe in art as well.
Some people watch Netflix and go to bars. That's their way of fun and that's fine. My ways of having fun just happen to be (0) travelling and (1) building stuff.
I too like building things that I have a use for. And I do think sometimes maybe I'm not the only one who could make use out of it, which is why I believe so much in open source, whether the tool is menial or not.
Obviously there are parallels in other creative fields. The money thing was a big part of what almost ruined music for me - not only wanting to make money from it, but actually succeeding at making some money from it (which was somehow paradoxically even worse than wanting to). Looking at it as an art, that you do for enjoyment or fun or the heck of it or some other reason or no reason at all, is important.
That statement resonates with me - immensely. I was a musician for almost a decade before going to school for CS. I feel in love with the creativity that knowing how to code enabled. Just like the author, I made my fair share of worthless side projects and just like him I felt pressure to monetize them to no success which ultimately took all the fun out of them.
I've never been able to get the fire back to make stuff just because I can. I really hate that I've lost that.
One can also think of work on one's "side projects" as something like a musician's practice sessions. There's value in the time spent even if all you're doing is drilling your fingers and keeping your technique sharp. It can also be an opportunity to stretch yourself and develop new skills beyond what your main gig calls for.
I've had more than 10 projects, but also at least 3 big hits.
I sense your problem is that you love building stuff, but you are not fascinated or obsessed by business.
This is why you reliably build really cool and clever things but never make any serious money. Unless you are truly interested in money and business this is unlikely to change except by luck.
Find someone like me, or several someone's like me to hang out with, and to brainstorm business concepts, business model variations, marketing spins, brandname ideas...
Build your business muscle, or remain an employee forever.
Sadly, with these projects there seems to be no way to scale or sell at scale. Nor are they impossible to replicate cheaply and easily given the basic idea. Best you could get in my opinion from that is an acquihire. (Which may or may not be better than a straight hire.)
No business chops other than straight con will fix that.
The best out of these in my opinion is the flower app, the idea could grow (sic).
Build a better mousetrap, and you'll learn how to build a better mousetrap. You need to market it (or partner with someone who will) if you want to make money.
1. Get some kind of market validation before you build. Get commitments from paying customers (or even pre-payment), or directly see them paying for a near-identical offering, and have a competitive advantage to deliver it more cheaply.
2. Do an inventory exercise of why these projects have failed. Doing a quick run-through, it looks like you didn't do marketing or user research for any of these projects. If making a side business still excites you, make sure you do these steps before going to build any future side business.
3. I know nothing about landscaping, but as an outsider, Bloom looks a promising product. Go talk to customers!
3. If the marketing side of things doesn't interest you, but you still want to make side money, reach out to me, my email is <hn username> at gmail. My background is pure engineering, but I have friends who are looking for technical co-founders and have ideas that I could use more technical talent on.
I like what you got started on Caffeine. But how long would you say you spent on that? If it was more than 1 month, than that might be the start of your problem.
If that came together quickly, why did it stop? I need a tool to help me quit caffine. If this had a daily tracker, with little questions designed to assess my withdrawl and alert fullness, I would love to give you $5 a month for 2-3 months while I used your tool to help me gradually get off caffeine.
I made a similar tracker, let me know what you think, and what additional features you think would be helpful for someone that is interested in lowering their caffeine consumption like yourself.
I love yours as well. I drink an embarrassing amount currently. 2-3 coffee drinks and 4-5 sodas throughout the day.
I'm terrified that if I cut anything, my productiveness will suffer. I didn't even realize how much these drinks were overlapping before seeing these trackers, which is a good first step.
The number 1 thing I would like would be some type text message question I received every couple hours throughout the day. The question would just ask how sleepy I am. I would respond with a 1-5 based on how awake I am.
Then my alert fullness could be charted along with the caffeine in my body to see if they are even matching up. The app could then suggest which drink I could cut out, and suffer the least.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate the feedback. That sounds like a great idea I will work on that functionality the coming days and keep you posted. I did that yesterday from reading your post.
I am almost in the same boat. I kind of feel, that I did not make it big considering the amount of time i spend. If it worked on freelancing, I would have made more. But i still think, perseverance would pay. We may be down but not out !
It sounds like you want to build a successful business, but end up building another coding project. I think that this is very common withs devs and the vision involved in each (business vs project) is incredibly different.
For one, a good business does not have to be innovative, it just has to be something you can sell. You might be able to make the most innovative AI to do X, but if it is not useful to anyone, it won't matter how innovative it is.
It's fantastic for a coding project, just not for a business.
I think the big difference is doing the non-technical part well (sales, marketing, branding, networking) and having the vision for what your business should look like.
Personally, I like to read IndieHackers to see what others have done well. A lot of it tends to be overcoming technical challenges and then business side work. Seems like you can handle the technical challenges!
The 3D printer repair one seemed like a straightforward small business. However it is a very small or local market - hobbyists tend to know how to fix them on their own and big businesses get support plans from manufacturers. Not impossible though.
The bloom app could be either improved or even pivoted. Quite promising, but unless it becomes a real business or is really the best of is class it can easily be cloned and undercut.
The "smart" watch of this kind litters the Kickstarter for example... and it is too nerdy to scale.
Rentals (not repairs), to be clear, but man were they heavy to ship. I did have a few rentals to bigger companies (Google, Samsung), sometimes it's easier for them to rent.
Yeah, most of them are random hacks. I don't mean to imply they were all intended to be businesses, though some were. More just meaning I have a lack of direction and haven't produced much of real value, despite thinking I was. After ten years, you realize the code and time spent starts to pile up.
There is. while book series on this very topic. The authors style doesn't suit everyone, but I agree with him.
Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited should be required reading for anyone thinking about starting a business or for those who have already taken that fateful step. The title refers to the author's belief that entrepreneurs--typically brimming with good but distracting ideas--make poor businesspeople. He establishes an incredibly organised and regimented plan, so that daily details are scripted, freeing the entrepreneur's mind to build the long-term success or failure of the business.
The amount of side projects you've gotten off the ground is really impressive!
Something that's been invaluable to me has been coming up with a goal hierarchy -- an idea taken from Angela Duckworth's Grit. It's helped me focus where I direct my energy both professionally and personally. Maybe it could help you decide what to do next, and show you how your projects thus far tie together.
>Marketing: The worst. I’m bad at it and it just does not interest me. Building the correct product and learning to sell it is a clear area for me to improve.
Why improve? There are lots of people out there with marketing skills looking for side gigs. Find a co-founder that is willing to do the marketing, customer acquisition side.
I'd look around for startup-networking meetups in your area. I've been to Seattle Startup Drinks on a number of occasions, and there are plenty of more "business-side" people that show up looking exactly for us--I didn't even have any interesting ideas to share, but when they heard I was a dev, I was instantly one of the most popular people there.
Same as what xxr said below. Meetups.com usually will list informal or formal get togethers. Could also email your local startup association/incubator and ask. They may know of people hanging around or coming out of a startup and are looking for a new project. Also check out reddit subs /r/startups and /r/entrepreneurs I see a lot of "marketing experts" on there, however I would take anyone on the internet claiming to be an expert or a "growth hacker" with a grain of salt.
I was thinking a part time marketing job would be an ideal gig for a woman who's looking after young kids, has experience and wants to work 5-20 hours a week on something interesting to keep their eye in. I'd look in those circles.
The same way non tech folks are terrible at hiring programmers is the same way tech folks are bad at hiring sales & marketing folks. Many people who claim to be good at marketing at terrible, worse you might end up with someone tarnishing your image by spamming your product or even getting your site blacklisted by Google due to bad SEO.
So do tell, how can we evaluate and vet that someone is good at sales & marketing?
There's a certain disconnect in that the author seems to require and at least want validation in terms of business success while selling himself as a 'true artist' interested only in making things.
Here's something unintuitive for engineers about successful entrepreneurs, they're usually not very curious. Seeing the world in black and white rather than in color creates tunnel vision and focus. However many engineers in the bay area don't see themselves as engineers in the traditional sense of the word but some new combination of hacker-artist-technologist-elite. It's unintuitive because many bay-area engineer feel undervalued and that this mythos is bolstered by the success of people they actively look down on.
So many engineers think that they are special snowflakes via: "I'm so smart and curious, I get bored so easily b/c I learn so fast. I need to constantly be learning and creating." They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique.
It takes a certain amount of focus and thus lack of curiosity to practice one kick a millions times vs a million different kicks. The expertise often comes at the cost of an uninteresting and single-direction life. Wether this is better or worse than sampling all the pre-packaged things (things like TED talks are the hedonistic equivalent of sex/drugs/food) that life has to offer is up to the individual.
In the Bay, the jack-of-all-trades think of themselves as master-of-all-trades while following to the letter online-recipes for success and wondering why they aren't a michelin start restaurant. Specialization puts you in a sparse enough zone where your thoughts can actually be unique.
* A curious life with specialization is possible though if the specialization is abstract enough. Specialization can also be built by following your true voice of curiosity rather than having it be influenced by social and monetary pressures. You can say that many youtuber for example followed their true voice, learning some video editing, learning to be humorous to make up for lack of academic success, and managed to be lucky b/c youtube was created. Most people stamp out their inner voice because 99% of the time, you'll end up specialization in something that can't create value that is directly linked to USD. Teaching is one example where the payoffs are so far down the road that they are inadequately compensated for what they do. (I'm ignoring the the majority of US teachers who are often losers on power trips)
>They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique.
Go look at some hilariously long job requirements and tell me there is not an economical reason for breadth-over-depth engineers.
Following a specialization is risky. Going after unique expertise is risky (it probably isn't unique anyway, just rare). These are true for tech because everything moves so quickly. You don't hear about the people that tried to specialize and failed to do so. You hear a bit more about people who specialized but the company/committee responsible for the tech decides to deprecate it.
It's also a slightly condescending and forced narrative when the pieces are examined.
Pursuing depth in knowledge isn't synonymous with a lack of curiosity just by definition.
People should probably also consider taking a break from quoting Fight Club and attacking people for "thinking they are special snowflakes" when making generalizations. It is not an argument that contributes much to a discussion and seeks to strip people of dignity.
That has been my approach all the time. For me, the problem is quite the opposite though. I tend to build things that go viral and become potential cash cows. I have no interest in that though and as soon as something gets popular I abandon it.
Sounds crazy but when my pet project becomes serious business I get cold feet and can't even touch it. The creative choices all of a sudden seems really crucial and I start procrastinate. I just want to experiment and build stuff without pressure.
Just curious, how do you get your projects viral? I'll be honest to admit, I've worked on side projects before that I've deliberately attempted to manufacture virality (build viral mechanisms off simple games, etc.), but it seems hard. When the simple game with viral hooks is done, I post it up on reddit or HN or PH or whatever, and it never takes off. I know the obvious conclusion is "the game/project sucks", just curious if I'm missing anything else.
I never really tried to build a side project of any real substance. Sometimes I wrote libraries or other things to better understand a language I was learning, or something like that.
I like to cook, I think the physicality of it is satisfying after dealing with computers all day. And as time goes on, the problems that get solved with code seem more and more frivolous. Though I guess you could argue I should try to change that instead of posting about it.
Doing side projects because you think it will make you money is probably the worst way to do it. Or at least have almost no expectations of making money.
You do side projects because it's interesting to you and you want to learn. And maybe you can leverage what you learn into getting a job doing something that really interests you. Chances are much greater that you will make a lot more money getting a better job through a side project than you will from the side project itself.
Perhaps I can give you some perspective from... the future. I've been doing what you're doing for about 20 years now, and have worked on (mainly with one other partner) probably 100 things? Some were full blown companies, some were just fun side projects, some were apps that made pretty good money, etc. Perhaps some things I've realized recently will be useful to you:
* It took us around 6-8 years before we made any money at all on anything we did. The thing that ended up making money wasn't even a sure thing, it just happened to work out. For a good part of those 6-8 years we thought we sucked because things never quite worked out. It turned out we were learning a bunch of stuff that turned out to be very useful for a whole new thing that came along (phone apps).
* Making money wasn't the most important thing for me in these projects, but once we started making money we could quit our jobs and do our own stuff full time. That turned out to be super important, and is the most important part of making money on your projects probably.
* Making technology and making a business are two pretty different things, and it's pretty rare that someone is really into both of them. That's probably ok! There are a bunch of businesses that naturally develop out of good technology, so you can probably just work on things that make sense given your strengths.
* Jumping around and doing lots of different things is one of my traits as well, and for a while I thought it was a big weakness. It can be. Sometimes an idea needs a few years of consistent effort to see results. Other times though, you were right to give up as it wasn't going anywhere. For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done. Then I am making progress no matter which ones fail. Then jumping around doesn't feel as bad. That all being said, there are boring and discouraging times in every project and it can be important that you see things through beyond where you're simply interested intellectually.
I'm sure there are a bunch more things that might be helpful that I can't quite think of now, I'll add them as I think of them.
Bottom line, what you can do is surprisingly rare (it just doesn't feel that way on HN). It's ok to take some time to develop these skills, one of which is filtering ideas to work on. If you spend enough years working at it then you might even end up an overnight success :)
"In many ways, I’m an just an obsessive builder, and like to busy myself learning new things and making cool projects."
In which case, I'd say he accomplished his goals! These sound like great projects.
Unfortunately actually building a product is only one part of building a successful business.
I wonder how often this guy talks to customers? Learns their needs? Pain points? Did he ask anyone if they would pay for a new Javascript game engine (for example) before he wrote one?
If he didn't, then he shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't understand how his products fit into the market and into his potential customers' lives. And if he doesn't understand any of that, then making money will be next to impossible.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI'm just not sure how to market it. I was going down a path of appealing to data-nerds with yards, focusing on the data techniques used to make decisions.
I've also experimented with using a physics ending to design beds, but haven't got it tweaked right: http://www.plantwithbloom.com/physics.html
(pretty fun if you want to see some plants get wrecked)
The value seems too low as it to get people purchase it. I'm considering partnering with nurseries, but the build out to use their inventories would be ambitious.
I'm in a similar boat, you are doing FAR better than I ever have (many "plans that come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines" over here), but lately I've not been too disappointed.
I stopped caring if I failed to complete a project once my initial burst of interest disappeared - usually as I'd learned what I wanted to learn and my curiosity was best directed elsewhere rather than slogging on with a project I'd lost interest in (plenty of those you can get paid for, this is supposed to be hobby time!)
The new skills I learn for fun have led onto new jobs, better ability to function at my day job, friendships, collaborations, a fun summer at ITP Camp in New York, etc.
I don't think they are worthless, you learned a lot, but it sounds like you also wish to have monetary benefits from them, so I would suggest rounding out your skill set.
This is probably what you should actually do.
I don't think this is any more likely than a financial success. I have 24 github repos for side projects, and have only had one issue created.
Let me offer a possible coping mechanism: realize that you are an artist. You are a true hacker.
For people like us, having ideas and making them real is the purpose of life. Since the 90s, there has been an immense pressure on our community put everything we do in get-rich-quick terms, which as been super destructive the psyches of many hackers. Be mindful of this, then cast it aside.
No matter what, keep having ideas and making them real.
Don't just take my word for it, ask Alan Watts: https://soundcloud.com/jeffreysource/above-beyond-ft-alan-wa...
(Even many startups fail this litmus test.)
Hacking is fun, but life as a starving programmer is not.
There is a vast difference between getting reasonable money and negative money. Bigger than between making reasonable living wage and being filthy rich in fact.
Building Uber and creating Uber are two entirely different things.
It is easy to build something if you have the blueprint, it is much harder to imagine something new and build it without knowing the exact next step.
For comparison, you could back of envelope analyse the market impact of, say, automated 2D floor and garden planning with AI. It is possible to undercut in a week in implementation and in seconds by a single guy with marketing and connections. On the upside, it could be pivoted. The main drawback is that it also does not make sense at a local level. (Unlike the 3D printer repair which might.)
The existence of (lots of) 'starving artists' is pretty strong evidence that at least some people may ultimately benefit from art that doesn't turn a profit.
Some people definitely need to make art, whatever the cost to them personally. I'm one of them. (And I'm lucky that my art is really cheap to make.)
It's really more of a question of finding meanings; I see where he's coming from. There is a certain kind of despair when you look back at 10 years worth of side projects and none have "taken off". I've only seriously worked on side projects in the past 3~4 years (full time engineer for 10 years), and even with less than half the time spent, and less than half projects completed compared to OP, I still feel a bit of this.
In my view, anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist.
I think it's worth mentioning I think this might be a little outdated of a definition because philosophy and art is agreeing more every day that everything in art grows out of the survival and reproduction instincts.
They also appear to agree more every day that your last point, that "anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist" holds true.
Just as an aside, serious free software maintenance work is not cutting edge and also fulfills your challenge of not being "outsource-able" to a small team of low-wage devs.
Or at least I've always assumed it is. Where can I pay some small amount of money to test and see whether a small team can "fix X without breaking the users' existing programs" for a poorly documented FLOSS interface that depends on undefined behavior in C?
Even writing an OSS project from scratch. It only becomes art if it really is done either clearly superior or is something entirely new. Plus it must be executed really well.
It has to be something new and different. Otherwise at best you have kitsch.
There is a vast difference between art and craft.
I love building stuff that has no purpose whatsoever but is just cool. I love building stuff that only I have a use for. I love doing tech for artistic value because I believe in art as well.
Some people watch Netflix and go to bars. That's their way of fun and that's fine. My ways of having fun just happen to be (0) travelling and (1) building stuff.
That statement resonates with me - immensely. I was a musician for almost a decade before going to school for CS. I feel in love with the creativity that knowing how to code enabled. Just like the author, I made my fair share of worthless side projects and just like him I felt pressure to monetize them to no success which ultimately took all the fun out of them.
I've never been able to get the fire back to make stuff just because I can. I really hate that I've lost that.
I sense your problem is that you love building stuff, but you are not fascinated or obsessed by business.
This is why you reliably build really cool and clever things but never make any serious money. Unless you are truly interested in money and business this is unlikely to change except by luck.
Find someone like me, or several someone's like me to hang out with, and to brainstorm business concepts, business model variations, marketing spins, brandname ideas...
Build your business muscle, or remain an employee forever.
bingo. this is my issue as well.
The best out of these in my opinion is the flower app, the idea could grow (sic).
1. Get some kind of market validation before you build. Get commitments from paying customers (or even pre-payment), or directly see them paying for a near-identical offering, and have a competitive advantage to deliver it more cheaply.
2. Do an inventory exercise of why these projects have failed. Doing a quick run-through, it looks like you didn't do marketing or user research for any of these projects. If making a side business still excites you, make sure you do these steps before going to build any future side business.
3. I know nothing about landscaping, but as an outsider, Bloom looks a promising product. Go talk to customers!
3. If the marketing side of things doesn't interest you, but you still want to make side money, reach out to me, my email is <hn username> at gmail. My background is pure engineering, but I have friends who are looking for technical co-founders and have ideas that I could use more technical talent on.
If that came together quickly, why did it stop? I need a tool to help me quit caffine. If this had a daily tracker, with little questions designed to assess my withdrawl and alert fullness, I would love to give you $5 a month for 2-3 months while I used your tool to help me gradually get off caffeine.
Here's some source if you're interested: https://github.com/LastZactionHero/caffeine_js https://github.com/LastZactionHero/caffeine_api
https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cucuso/caffeine-tracker/i...
I'm terrified that if I cut anything, my productiveness will suffer. I didn't even realize how much these drinks were overlapping before seeing these trackers, which is a good first step.
The number 1 thing I would like would be some type text message question I received every couple hours throughout the day. The question would just ask how sleepy I am. I would respond with a 1-5 based on how awake I am.
Then my alert fullness could be charted along with the caffeine in my body to see if they are even matching up. The app could then suggest which drink I could cut out, and suffer the least.
For one, a good business does not have to be innovative, it just has to be something you can sell. You might be able to make the most innovative AI to do X, but if it is not useful to anyone, it won't matter how innovative it is.
It's fantastic for a coding project, just not for a business.
I think the big difference is doing the non-technical part well (sales, marketing, branding, networking) and having the vision for what your business should look like.
Personally, I like to read IndieHackers to see what others have done well. A lot of it tends to be overcoming technical challenges and then business side work. Seems like you can handle the technical challenges!
The bloom app could be either improved or even pivoted. Quite promising, but unless it becomes a real business or is really the best of is class it can easily be cloned and undercut.
The "smart" watch of this kind litters the Kickstarter for example... and it is too nerdy to scale.
Others are random hacks. :)
Yeah, most of them are random hacks. I don't mean to imply they were all intended to be businesses, though some were. More just meaning I have a lack of direction and haven't produced much of real value, despite thinking I was. After ten years, you realize the code and time spent starts to pile up.
Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited should be required reading for anyone thinking about starting a business or for those who have already taken that fateful step. The title refers to the author's belief that entrepreneurs--typically brimming with good but distracting ideas--make poor businesspeople. He establishes an incredibly organised and regimented plan, so that daily details are scripted, freeing the entrepreneur's mind to build the long-term success or failure of the business.
Something that's been invaluable to me has been coming up with a goal hierarchy -- an idea taken from Angela Duckworth's Grit. It's helped me focus where I direct my energy both professionally and personally. Maybe it could help you decide what to do next, and show you how your projects thus far tie together.
Why improve? There are lots of people out there with marketing skills looking for side gigs. Find a co-founder that is willing to do the marketing, customer acquisition side.
So do tell, how can we evaluate and vet that someone is good at sales & marketing?
I'm pretty good at marketing and making small-medium money, happy to either do it or teach-to-fish...
Here's something unintuitive for engineers about successful entrepreneurs, they're usually not very curious. Seeing the world in black and white rather than in color creates tunnel vision and focus. However many engineers in the bay area don't see themselves as engineers in the traditional sense of the word but some new combination of hacker-artist-technologist-elite. It's unintuitive because many bay-area engineer feel undervalued and that this mythos is bolstered by the success of people they actively look down on.
So many engineers think that they are special snowflakes via: "I'm so smart and curious, I get bored so easily b/c I learn so fast. I need to constantly be learning and creating." They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique.
It takes a certain amount of focus and thus lack of curiosity to practice one kick a millions times vs a million different kicks. The expertise often comes at the cost of an uninteresting and single-direction life. Wether this is better or worse than sampling all the pre-packaged things (things like TED talks are the hedonistic equivalent of sex/drugs/food) that life has to offer is up to the individual.
In the Bay, the jack-of-all-trades think of themselves as master-of-all-trades while following to the letter online-recipes for success and wondering why they aren't a michelin start restaurant. Specialization puts you in a sparse enough zone where your thoughts can actually be unique.
* A curious life with specialization is possible though if the specialization is abstract enough. Specialization can also be built by following your true voice of curiosity rather than having it be influenced by social and monetary pressures. You can say that many youtuber for example followed their true voice, learning some video editing, learning to be humorous to make up for lack of academic success, and managed to be lucky b/c youtube was created. Most people stamp out their inner voice because 99% of the time, you'll end up specialization in something that can't create value that is directly linked to USD. Teaching is one example where the payoffs are so far down the road that they are inadequately compensated for what they do. (I'm ignoring the the majority of US teachers who are often losers on power trips)
Go look at some hilariously long job requirements and tell me there is not an economical reason for breadth-over-depth engineers.
Following a specialization is risky. Going after unique expertise is risky (it probably isn't unique anyway, just rare). These are true for tech because everything moves so quickly. You don't hear about the people that tried to specialize and failed to do so. You hear a bit more about people who specialized but the company/committee responsible for the tech decides to deprecate it.
Pursuing depth in knowledge isn't synonymous with a lack of curiosity just by definition.
People should probably also consider taking a break from quoting Fight Club and attacking people for "thinking they are special snowflakes" when making generalizations. It is not an argument that contributes much to a discussion and seeks to strip people of dignity.
That has been my approach all the time. For me, the problem is quite the opposite though. I tend to build things that go viral and become potential cash cows. I have no interest in that though and as soon as something gets popular I abandon it.
Sounds crazy but when my pet project becomes serious business I get cold feet and can't even touch it. The creative choices all of a sudden seems really crucial and I start procrastinate. I just want to experiment and build stuff without pressure.
I like to cook, I think the physicality of it is satisfying after dealing with computers all day. And as time goes on, the problems that get solved with code seem more and more frivolous. Though I guess you could argue I should try to change that instead of posting about it.
You do side projects because it's interesting to you and you want to learn. And maybe you can leverage what you learn into getting a job doing something that really interests you. Chances are much greater that you will make a lot more money getting a better job through a side project than you will from the side project itself.
Otherwise you'll just be writing non-novel web code over and over and not learn anything from that.
* It took us around 6-8 years before we made any money at all on anything we did. The thing that ended up making money wasn't even a sure thing, it just happened to work out. For a good part of those 6-8 years we thought we sucked because things never quite worked out. It turned out we were learning a bunch of stuff that turned out to be very useful for a whole new thing that came along (phone apps).
* Making money wasn't the most important thing for me in these projects, but once we started making money we could quit our jobs and do our own stuff full time. That turned out to be super important, and is the most important part of making money on your projects probably.
* Making technology and making a business are two pretty different things, and it's pretty rare that someone is really into both of them. That's probably ok! There are a bunch of businesses that naturally develop out of good technology, so you can probably just work on things that make sense given your strengths.
* Jumping around and doing lots of different things is one of my traits as well, and for a while I thought it was a big weakness. It can be. Sometimes an idea needs a few years of consistent effort to see results. Other times though, you were right to give up as it wasn't going anywhere. For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done. Then I am making progress no matter which ones fail. Then jumping around doesn't feel as bad. That all being said, there are boring and discouraging times in every project and it can be important that you see things through beyond where you're simply interested intellectually.
I'm sure there are a bunch more things that might be helpful that I can't quite think of now, I'll add them as I think of them.
Bottom line, what you can do is surprisingly rare (it just doesn't feel that way on HN). It's ok to take some time to develop these skills, one of which is filtering ideas to work on. If you spend enough years working at it then you might even end up an overnight success :)
A project portfolio
In which case, I'd say he accomplished his goals! These sound like great projects.
Unfortunately actually building a product is only one part of building a successful business.
I wonder how often this guy talks to customers? Learns their needs? Pain points? Did he ask anyone if they would pay for a new Javascript game engine (for example) before he wrote one?
If he didn't, then he shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't understand how his products fit into the market and into his potential customers' lives. And if he doesn't understand any of that, then making money will be next to impossible.
Having side projects is a luxury of true joy. I notice this all the time when life(tm) tries to push side projects aside.
I love my side projects.